Why Language Matters To Us

SPEAKER_03 0:02

Hey everyone, welcome to another episode of Carry On Friends, the Caribbean American Experience. I'm your host, Carrie Ann. I've been in a season of exploring Caribbean languages, particular patois. And I shouldn't say I've been in a season because I've always leveraged language as one of the key things that I use to represent my identity. So language is something that is very important to me. And back in 2021, I had Dr. Caroline Grant on the podcast to talk about Caribbean languages and education. And I'll link to that in the show notes. And last year, I had a wonderful conversation with O'Neill Madden. And I've been sharing those clips again recently because, again, there's a lot of conversation around Patua, official language, but no disrespect to that conversation. There's an even bigger conversation we need to be having, but I don't want to get out of the way, just no. And so the link to the conversation with O'Neill is also in the show notes. But I didn't stop there. I recently released a research paper or white paper, if you're familiar with those, I'll have a link to that in the show notes. And this research brief that I created is how the Jamaica New Testament is functioning as an informal path to a literacy tool for reading and writing. And I'll have a whole episode that I'm dedicating to that, right? Because that really deserves its own conversation or multiple conversations, if I'm being honest. But those two episodes have been cited in the paper. And, you know, my experience and other things have really gone into this research paper. So I'll have the link to that. So please check it out and share it with, you know, share the landing page with people so they could sign up and make sure you also, you know, be part of the newsletter because some of the conversations I'm having are also happening in the newsletter. So this brings me to today and this episode that you're about to listen that fits right into the theme of language. So if you don't know, I co-produced Strictly Facts, a guide to Caribbean History and Culture, with the Dr. Alexandra Miller. And in 2021, Alexandra sat down with Dr. Joseph T. Farquarson, and he is a senior lecturer in linguistics at the University of the West Indies, Mona, and he is the coordinator of the Jamaica Language Unit. Now, this is very important because the Jamaica Language Unit is the JLU in the Cassidy JLU model of how we actually write and spell Patua, which is critical. I did not know this existed until Dr. Carole Lee Grant came on the podcast. So this episode with strictly facts is grounded around the history of Caribbean languages and how they form, why they were degraded, and what it actually means to call something broken English. And I'm dropping that episode here in the carry-on friends feed for two reasons. I think it is important to add history to the context of all of this language. And Dr. Farr Carson's work with the Jamaica Language Unit, the Cassidy JLU model writing system, is really converging very nicely. So I want you to give it a full listen and then I'll come back a little later, maybe in a couple weeks, with the episode discussing the Jamaica New Testament brief. All right, enough of that. Here is Dr. Joseph T. Farquarson on Caribbean languages with Dr. Alexandra Miller on Strictly Facts.

Research Brief And Listening Links

SPEAKER_04 4:30

Our episode today tackles an ongoing conversation, the history and importance of Caribbean languages. I have so many memories just thinking of how language has impacted my life, whether it's been how I use our language mostly in my household and not typically outside of my household, or when, you know, Tessan in 2013 when she joined The Voice, and you know, after her audition portion, when they were talking to her about what she does, and she goes, you know, singing is my bread and butta. And I just remember thinking of how immense that was for Tessan to, you know, be using her accent on what in my mind back then was, you know, big, big foreign TV, right? And how proud I felt to hear her accent. Or um other times, like, you know, when Rihanna released work in 2016, Bad Song, you know, love the dance hall inspiration of the video. But then there was a lot of you know conversation around what language she was having and some people not being able to understand what she was saying. And I had a friend in college say to me, you know, Alex, what is she saying? Because you're Jamaican, you speak Jamaican tatways. And I was like, Yes, she's speaking obviously with an accent, but as we all know, Rihanna is not Jamaican, as you know, minus what some of the Twitter things were where a while ago Rihanna is from Barbados. So obviously, it's important to make it clear that as a region, we don't all have the same language conventions. We're not all speaking Jamaican patois. So we're gonna dive in a bit to the history of Caribbean language a bit with my guest today. So with us today, we have Dr. Joseph Farkinson.

Meet Dr Farquharson And The JLU

SPEAKER_04 6:10

Um and I will turn it over to Dr. Farkinson to introduce himself. So please let us know who you are, what you do, and obviously what Caribbean country you represent.

SPEAKER_02 6:20

Hi, Alexandria. Thanks for having me on the show. I am a senior lecturer in linguistics at the University of the West Indies in Mona, that is in Jamaica. And I'm located in the Department of Language, Linguistics and Philosophy. I think also important, I wear another hat, and that is as coordinator of the Jamaican Language Unit. And the Jamaican Language Unit is a language planning agency kind of unique in that it was one of the first such uh setup in the English official Caribbean. And the whole goal of the unit is for the planning and development of the Jamaican language. So moving the Jamaican language from where it is now to being even greater than it is, and that's a tough task because it is great now. I I wanted to flip the script a bit though. You mentioned your background, and I just wanted to know well, what is your background? You mentioned Jamaica being from Jamaica, but what's the story there?

SPEAKER_04 7:33

Oh, well, the listeners would know, but yes, definitely happy to tell you more. So I am not Jamaican born, I was born in the US, but my family is thank you. I appreciate it. I do have my citizenship, so I would hope so. Oh and yeah, so you know, Jamaica is very much so home for me. But you did mention um your work with the Jamaican language unit. So I wanted to ask you, you know, how you got interested in doing this research.

SPEAKER_02 8:04

Okay, so I I've been interested in languages for a very long time since high school. In high school, I did uh Spanish, English was also one of my favorite subjects. And I think by sixth form, I realized that I had a knack for language, and I also had a teacher who had done linguistics, introduced us to linguistics, and I thought, hey, here's something that I can do. And so by the time I got to sixth form, I started checking out UI's linguistics program, you know, what they offered. And I thought, okay, yes, this is definitely the thing for me. I was interested in the Jamaican language, and that's what you refer to as Jamaican patwa. And I know that there were people at UI who were interested in this thing, who were pushing for it to become official, and who were saying, you know, it is a language, it has structure, etc. And I remember even as far back as my high school days, I had very positive attitudes towards the language. I was entering JCDC festival competitions, doing um uh standard English pieces, but also their Jamaican dialects, what they call Jamaican dialect pieces. And I was also writing articles in the newspapers, responding to people, saying, you know, it is a language and we should be proud of our language, proud of who we are. And so that's where it came from. So a very long-standing interest in language-related issues. Um, so that I'm coordinator for the Jamaican Language Unit is really by chance. I can't say I was destined for this. It's really by chance that I happened to be in the right place at the right time. And so my head of department asked me to be coordinator, and I've been doing that for the past two years now. August coming will be two full years.

SPEAKER_04 10:09

Wonderful. Well, you know, all things fall into place as they are supposed to. So I definitely believe you're supposed

Broken English Claim And Naming Debate

SPEAKER_04 10:15

to be there. Um, but as you mentioned, you know, there's a lot of different words to describe languages, especially pato in particular. So some people refer to it as a possibly a creole or a dialect or, you know, also a language, but then also patois, you know, sort of comes with this negative connotation, and I've heard it be described as quote unquote broken English. So could you talk a bit about how you describe Caribbean languages, some of those juxtapositions between those words, and why have Caribbean languages been described as broken?

SPEAKER_02 10:50

Okay, so we have been evolving, and this, of course, this whole journey starts during uh slavery and colonization, that for most people of European descent, the language developed by slaves, uh by enslaved Africans and mostly used by them, and I'm saying mostly used by them, because the languages that we identify as Jamaican patois, as Bajan dialect, as Trini dialect, etc., all of those were used not only by blacks, but also by white people. There's a sentiment out there, um, both among lay people and also among some scholars, too, that enslaved Africans developed these languages to hide things from slave masters, you know, so they wouldn't know what they were saying. And I keep on saying to them, if that was the case, enslaved Africans did a very poor job of it. Because whites in these territories were talking these languages pretty much from the get-go, and they were interacting with Africans in the language, especially if they interacted very closely with Africans or people of African descent. And so we're thinking about your overseer or busher on the plantation, that person definitely could speak in in Jamaican Pato or in Bajan dialect because they had more intimate communication and spent much more time with Africans. But I said it it starts there, but our whole positioning on these languages uh has been uh evolving. So in the 17th century, in the 18th century, 19th century, uh a lot of people thought, well, okay, it's just the attempt of Africans to speak English, and they are they are failing terribly at it. And so it is broken English. And that was the sentiment for quite a while. And then in the 20th century, especially the early part of the 20th century, uh, people started to realize um patterns between what was happening in Jamaica, what was happening in Trina and Tobago, what was happening elsewhere, and a general term was taken from English, a term that English had taken from French, and that is patois to refer to it. And I think why it had occurred, if I understand the history well, a lot of people had been looking at Haiti, and because Haitian Creole was so well established, and um they they saw Haitian Creole as Pato, and there was an understanding that there were so many similarities in terms of structure and social history between Haiti and Jamaica and Trade and Tobago and Barbados that they started using the term patois. Then came the 1940s, and uh that was now the period of people like Louis Bennett Covoli, of Eric Covoli, and a whole set of uh people who were responsible for the birth of the new nation. And so there was agitation then for us to kind of carve out our own identity and assert our own independence. But a lot of that sense of self didn't take place with a wholesale rejection of Europeanness, etc. What they tried to do was to kind of carve out a part of that European space as their own. And so they created, you could say, a local version of that European identity. And so in that period, what you got was uh a notion of these languages as being dialects of the European language, and so you got what in Jamaica became Jamaica dialect or Jamaican dialect, Trini dialect, etc., because people saw black Jamaicans as speaking essentially a version of English. The problem with that is it still subscribed to the view that these were broken forms of English not good enough until the 1950s, 1960s, when serious linguistic work started to take place. And here I'm talking about scholars such as Frederick Cassidy, who I believe was born in Jamaica, but he's um American or of American parentage, uh, I believe. Uh, but he was born in Jamaica, spent a good while in Jamaica, and then left. He came back in adulthood to study the language. Uh, by that time, too, we had Robert LePage, who is an Englishman who had taken up a position at the University College of the West Indies, which is what Yue was at that time. And as Cassidy came to study the language, um, LePage had started to develop um an interest in the language because although he was employed to teach um Chaucer Middle English literature, he found what he heard around him much more fascinating than what was in uh medieval poetry. And so he set out to study that. And then came um other local scholars like Beryl Bailey and all around the region. Other scholars started to emerge, like Richard Olsop, like Walter Edwards. And LePage himself, even after he had left Jamaica, was responsible for providing scholarships at York University in um in England, I think it's the University of York, for Caribbean people to study linguistics and go back home and study their own languages. And so an entire generation of Caribbean linguists were educated at York in the UK under Robert LePage. Robert LePage is credited, I believe he's responsible for the shift to referring to the languages as Creoles. And so that was the birth of Jamaican Creole and uh Barbadian Creole. Uh and that held sway for a while. And LePage was using a system which was born in the in the period of colonialism and slavery, that people and things born in the West Indies were referred to as Creoles. So you had white Creoles and black Creoles. So a lot of people think that Creole only referred to black people. No, white people born in the West Indies were also referred to as Creoles. So if you read Edward Long's 18th century history of Jamaica, he referred to the white Creoles and how they were adopting the mannerisms of the blacks. Um he also referred to black Creoles, they were um Creole hens, they were Creole, I believe, horses, etc. So whatever was born or reared in the West Indies was Creole. And Le Page said, okay, these things were, these languages were born in the West Indies, so they are Creoles. Um Jamaican Creole, Trinidadian Creole, etc. And that kind of stuck. And then I believe somewhere in the 60s or 70s, Mervyn Elaine, uh Trinbegonian linguist who spent most of his working life in Jamaica, suggested, well, why are we worrying with all of these labels like patois and creole and broken English, broken French? Why don't we just use the national adjectives for them? You know, so the Spanish people call their language Spanish, the French people call their language French. The language of Jamaicans, the chief language, is Jamaican. Makes sense, makes perfect sense. And so there is a movement these days of just using that. So for Haitian Creole, many linguists just say Haitian now, or we say Jamaican. Um, so not Jamaican Pato. Now, that whole thing of why the naming is important, is because 56 years ago, when a lot of people said patois, you could kind of hear, you know, the bile behind it. Uh they were thinking of it as this low-class broken thing. But truth be told, from about the 70s thereabouts, especially with the success of Jamaican music outside of Jamaica, a lot of Jamaicans started to own the language. And so when they used Pato, it didn't have this same undertone. And so, admittedly, when a lot of people say Jamaican pato now, they don't really mean anything bad by it. But we still think we would be further emancipated by just dropping all of these additional labels and just calling the languages Bajan, Jamaican, Guyanese. That was a very long answer.

SPEAKER_04 20:23

No, no, it was very, it answered a lot of continuing questions I had as well. But I agree, I think it's important, especially when thinking of the colonial project, right? It functions to allow us or to make us think that we are secondary and always appealing to England. So by, you know, using these words, it you know, emphasizes that in our minds, in our psyches and things like that of that nature, that we are secondary. So I definitely agree with, you know, just saying Jamaican as a language. Um, but I do want to point to something you talked about earlier, um, which was the African roots of Jamaican. So could you say more about those roots and perhaps, you know, maybe give us some examples about tracing some of these connections?

SPEAKER_02 21:06

Okay. So that too has been uh a debate, not only among people, um, lay people, but also among scholars and among linguists about the African contribution to these languages that are normally designated as Creoles. So are they African languages essentially with English words? Or are we looking at English with African, you know, words and structure? What is

From Patois To Creole To Jamaican

SPEAKER_02 21:40

this? Um, and the same thing too for for for Haitian or for um Palenquero in Colombia or Papiamento. How were they made? And there's no easy answer to that. 70 or so years of uh dedicated research has Given us some answers, but has not solved the issue completely. And the field is kind of split three ways between scholars who believe that they are essentially European languages with some African influences. And the term that is used for those linguists is superstratist. So the European languages are called super straight languages because they are that layer or stratum that was added later. So the languages of the enslaved Africans would be the substrate languages or the substratum. So that's the lower level. And there we're looking at the languages that people are introduced to and the sequence in which they're introduced to them. So the languages that they come with would form the base layer or the lowest layer, the foundation layer. And that's why it's the substratum. And then the languages that get added on later are the super stratum or superstratum. Now there is also the matter of prestige. So substrate and superstrate also tells us something about the prestige of these languages. So the substrate languages are generally the languages of the subjugated people, and the prestige that goes with them is the same kind of prestige that goes to subjugated people. And then the superstrate languages are higher in prestige. So there are those who believe these things are really European languages with some influences, but minimal influence from the substrate languages. Those are the superstratists. Then there are those linguists who believe these things are really African languages that have kind of put on European garb. And so they are hiding their Africanness. But if you dig, you will find that you're dealing with African structures. Those people are substratists. And then there are universalists who say, you know, both camps are talking nonsense. What you get in Creole languages are universal features because they see Creoles as being brand new, kind of born-again languages. That's what one linguist, Michel de Graff, refers to them as. Many of the Creole languages in this region, the Atlantic region, and here I'm not just talking about the Caribbean, but also Africa. So you have um Guinea-Bissau Creole, you have Nigerian, uh, what's referred to as Nigerian Pidgin English, Ghanaian Pidgin English, Pichi that's spoken in Fernando Poe. All of these have a shared history in European slavery. They tend to have a lot of features that are typical of many West African languages. So they have uh serial verb constructions. Serial verb constructions are constructions which have verbs in a sequence, but without anything joining them. So it's not like English where you say go and see if so-and-so-one has come. Um, you say go look f. So there's nothing joining the go and the look. Um, you get things like meada senkom call me, um, where you have sen, come, and call all together without any conjunction joining them. Um, you get things like uh sengo and sencom. We are talking about the direction of the sending and the go versus the come will tell you what direction it is, whether it's towards the speaker or away from the speaker. So serial verb constructions are probably good evidence for African influence. There is also how we organize what is called the copula system. Uh, and let me see if I can do that very quickly. So if you think about an English sentence like, I am a teacher, where you get in Jamaica, me'a teacher, uh, you get that ah in there, which is kind of like an equal sign. This it's it's the equative marker. And what that little thing ah is saying is that what is on its left is equal to what is on its right. So teacher equals me, me equals teacher, me a teacher. Yeah? Then English says, I am a teacher. Then English has another construction, I am sick, and in Jamaican, we say me sick. Now that's sort of what we call a predicative structure. Jamaican doesn't use a marker. So in the case where we had me'a teacher and you had that in there, we don't have anything. There's zero, there's nothing in there between the subject and this predicate. Um, whereas English says, I am sick. So English had I am a teacher, the English had I am sick, Jamaican uses me'a teacher, but me zero sick, me sick. Two different strategies. Then English has the structure, I am at home, or let me use I am at school, me de school, where you have this marker now day that indicates the location. So whatever it's to the right of day is the location of the thing or person to the left of de. So me de school or me de a school. Three different strategies where English used. So English, I am a teacher, I am sick, I am at school. Whereas Jamaican. And this happens, I think, pretty much the same way in Haitian, if my memory serves me well. In in Tobegonian, um, Creole or Tobegonian in Gaia, it operates the same way. And there are several West African languages that organize their grammar in that way. There's another thing too when we want to emphasize or highlight something, we have this marker ah in Trinidadian. Um, that is um is so you say a Joseph a talk to you, a Joseph A talk to you, um, where that ah is helping to highlight the Joseph. Let me use another sentence because I want it so I can move something up in the sentence and show you how the highlighting or the emphasis takes place. So if you say Joseph put the book pan the table, you can say a the book, Joseph put pan the table, where you move up the book, but you could also say upon the table, Joseph put the book, where you move upon the table. Yeah? So whatever is highlighted or emphasized is moved up right behind that thing that we call the focus marker. Ah. Other thing happens though, is that when you focus or when you highlight a verb, it doesn't only get moved, but it gets copied. So you get a put Joseph put the book on the table. That doesn't happen with the other things.

SPEAKER_04 30:21

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 30:21

And there are African languages that do this. Um, some do it slightly differently, that the repetition they get is reduplication. So they might have something like a put put Joseph the book on the table. So the copying might not happen in the same way, but there is this notion that something is copied. And two, there is um a sense that the the version of the verb that gets moved up is more like a noun, is more nominal. And that is why, like uh, I the walk the walk met me tired, yeah, or I do what me walk, tired me out, where you can have something that is a verb occurring with D, which is an article that normally occurs with nouns. And so some of these structures are are evidence for the influence of Africa in these languages.

SPEAKER_04 31:16

Wow. I'm really appreciative that you took us through those grammatical structures because I think it's something that is definitely not talked about and helps obviously highlight our connections to our ancestors. Um, another question I had was just to talk a bit about some regional and both regional across the Caribbean as well as interstate or you know, intrastate similarities and differences. So my people are from what we would say country. Um, and I remember being in college and talking to some of my friends who were from tone, and they would be like, no, no, no, Alex, that that is different. I've never heard um that phrase or that word before. Obviously, I always have a big ups and best on Clarendon every time. Yes, but yes, could you talk through a bit about um some of those you know similarities

African Roots Hidden In Grammar

SPEAKER_04 32:10

and differences in our population?

SPEAKER_02 32:13

Okay, there was something you said earlier um when you said there are people who consider Jamaican to be broken English or Trini or any of these languages as broken English. And one of the reasons why people view them as broken versions of English is because they have the wrong starting point. They are looking at standard English as the starting point. So the belief is that enslaved Africans heard standard English, tried to learn Standard English, and failed. That's not true. Standard English was there, it was in the environment. But what most enslaved Africans were exposed to was not Standard English, but various non-standard dialects of English. These were people speaking non-standard dialects of English. So that's where we need to start. And so we're looking at people who didn't necessarily say, I am going to school. Um, but they might have said, I just go to school, uh, which is what the Trinities might say. And so when you're looking for the origin of these languages, we have to start looking in the right place. So you spoke about words. Many of the words that we have across the Caribbean come from these dialects of English. Um, some of them are archaisms that they have died out in English, some of them don't exist in Standard English, or they are used in a different way with a different meaning in Standard English, but they have been preserved in the Caribbean. Um, so let me give you an archaism and a dialect of regionalism in England that survived in Jamaica, and that is Ataclaps. Ataclapse is a come-upons or retribution. So somebody might tell you that, you know, you know, if you are playing the fool, uh, if you're bothering the person, they'll tell you, just hold on, man, your attacks are come. You know, you'll soon get your come-upons, or if somebody is just doing fear badness, you can say, uh, you know, they might go meet them at a clops. Uh something like English Waterloo, you know, to meet your waterloo. That word attacks is from an English dialectal term afterclap or afterclapse, which means the same thing. Um, how do you get from after to utter? Um, you might know that not all Jamaicans say after. Some people say after, some people say after, some people say atta. Like uh at a me never tell you if it do it. After me never tell you if you do it. At time go go go go go to that. It's the same way you get from after uh or afterclaps to outer claps. Um, so you have these forms. Uh, and I was saying that we need to start in the right place. So we are not starting with standard English and breaking that down. We are starting with non-standard dialects. I was listening to a YouTube video a couple of years ago, two British women talking, and uh one of them said, you know, well, you know, it's possible that we'll have to Goodle it. We'll have to Google it. Not Google, Google. And what that is, is a hypercorrection. And that tells me that for the de l combination in her uh in her dialect, or at least those words in standard English that would have de l, she pronounces them as g-l. So she would say migl for middle, which we also say might. And possibly um she does that too for little and little. So many of these things that people think, oh, it's because Africans um were not educated and they couldn't manage English. No, our foreparents had nothing to do with it, they learned what they heard. They they did some things at times, so so for those things that I told you were were more than likely influenced by Africa, yes. But some of the things repronunciation and so on, leave my ancestors alone. They reproduce, I love that.

SPEAKER_04 37:17

Something that we've also been talking about is regional differences. So, you know, what immediately comes to mind are like sing songs in languages. So, could you talk a bit about how sing songs and you know accents come about?

SPEAKER_02 37:32

Okay, that reminded me that there was a part of your previous question that I didn't address. And that had to do with regional variation within a particular territory. That regional variation is due to various factors, so it's due to which white people came when and where they settled, and so you might have had concentrations of people. So you might have had concentrations of Scottish people in a particular area versus concentrations of Irish people in another area. Also, it has to do with the general history of the peopling of the territory. So, what a lot of lay people don't know is that for the peopling of Jamaica during the English period, it wasn't just about Africans being taken directly from Africa, but Jamaica was peopled in the very early days by um colonists from St. Kids, uh, because St. Kids was held by the British before um St. Kitts and Nevis, before Jamaica. Colonists came from Barbados. Uh, and in fact, the army that took Jamaica from the Spanish, that army was put together in the Eastern Caribbean. And then after they held Jamaica, more people came from the Eastern Caribbean. And somewhere in the 1660s, I believe it was, people from Nevis came over and they settled in Eastern Jamaica, in St. Thomas. Now, one thing that's interesting about Nevis is that the form of the past tense marker is min. So where other people might have been or ben or ben or en they use min. Nevis uses it, they settled in St. Thomas, St. Thomas uses, or this uh small pocket in St. Thomas uses it, which means we are looking at something that is the result of that particular migration. Then colonists from Suriname came over in the late 1660s and I think the early 1670s, and they settled in Western Jamaica in a place called Suriname Quarters. I'm from Western Jamaica. Now, the interesting thing is that in Western Jamaica, the form of the progressive marker is de. So midekuk, middawak, where in eastern Jamaica they would say mi'awak. Um, in Surinam, you get um in the language Srinan, you do get de and e the reviews form, as progressive marker. So they say midekom or mi e com. Um, and we have both forms in Western Jamaica. And so you can look at these regional varieties and link them to the way in which the country uh was populated, um, and that gives us some sort of insight. So even if we didn't have any historical records, the language itself could have given us some clue that um something different is happening here. Of course, later on, there was an addition in Jamaica, uh, as well as Guyana and Trinidad and Tobago of East Indians, and they added words. I don't think we have really explored yet um the extent to which they have influenced the the the grammar, the syntax of these languages. But in Trinidad, I know people point out the sing-song nature of Trini Creole. So Trini people does talk like this, and that's possibly due to the East Indian influence. So we would need probably to go to places like Westmoreland and study the uh Jamaican in Westmoreland or in Clarendon and see if we get the same sort of what English called prosody coming across. Now, accent, um, to answer your question, much of what we recognize as accent is due to different vowel qualities. Uh, and you'd be amazed at the differences in uh in how a particular vowel comes out. So what for you might be an ah could be produced a lot of different ways. So some people might say ah, some people might say uh, some people might say uh, some people might say uh. Sometimes it's slight, but if you put quite a few of those differences together, it creates a different sound. And so this is why, even within, let's say, the US, you get different sounds in people who say a and those people who say man, or the people who say baby um or sax for socks, etc. And they will sound different from the people who say socks. So that's largely the result of differences in vowels and vowel qualities. Consonants come in sometimes because if you have a flap, if you say water instead of water, um, that will also create a difference between your speech and the speech of others. Um, the same thing operates in the Caribbean. So I know in some places in Jamaica, there are people who think that their neighbors saying, You know, hear me a calio, uh, you get this sing song variety. There is a theory, it's it's it's a playful sort of theory that says that accents and and posody tend to mimic the landscape. And so if your land is flat, your accent will be flat. But if your landscape is one with hills and mountains, then you will speak in a way I haven't tested it. But we should.

SPEAKER_04 43:45

I think that was very interesting to me. Wow, yeah. I don't know, that was just so much to process, but I think, yeah, that last theory sounds very interesting. I wanted to take us a bit towards more not just recent conversations. Because as you said, these conversations have been going around for a while, this sort of national language discussion. Um, I remember a few years ago, there was this viral video of a man as uh, I believe he was a flight attendant giving the sort of flight instructions or you know, when they were going to seat them, etc. Yeah, he was Jamaican and he was giving it in Jamaican. And then, you know, there are also like festivals in Europe. I won't say the name of it because it's an explosive expletive, but you know it's a nice festival name. We'll see if my mom, how my mom would feel about that, but um there are festivals that you know use Jamaican expletives as the name of the festival.

SPEAKER_02 44:45

Whereas, you know, beer a beer tool.

SPEAKER_04 44:48

Is it a beer? Yeah, I think so. There's a yeah, but that but then again, you know, if a Jamaican performer was to say that on stage, they would be fine, right?

SPEAKER_01 44:58

In Jamaica.

SPEAKER_04 44:59

So could yeah, in Jamaica, sorry. So I think this whole conversation of like, you know, why our language hasn't been celebrated on the island is, or you know, to an extent, as you've gone through, has been very sad to a certain degree. But you know, again, it's taking this new form, especially through um our music, through our culture. So, could you talk through what you think of that per se, and also maybe the impact of music, culture, migration as well on our language?

SPEAKER_02 45:32

Okay, so I used to be very impatient, and of course, impatience is a prime feature characteristic of new converts. Um, new converts are impatient with people who can't see the light, you know. So I used to be very impatient, but as I mature, I become more tolerant of those who have not yet seen the light, because what I see really in terms of the reaction of many people to Creole languages,

Regional Variation And Migration Footprints

SPEAKER_02 46:10

or specifically to Jamaican, is equivalent to battered person syndrome because there is this history of hurt that is associated with language through the general culture, through schooling, and how it is that we are taught language. We're taught language, we are taught English in a way that is uh replacive, that in order to learn English, you have to erase Jamaican. And so that has left a lot of hurt, uh, which is why um a lot of people can't understand. And and here is a more fine-tuned analogy. Um, there are lots of people who were beaten and beaten mercilessly when they were young, when they were children by their parents, and they hated it. It it scarred them, it scarred them in deep ways. And while they were going through it, um, they didn't see it as an action of love. But then when, you know, when they get older, um they now become converted. You know, it's it was the best thing that could have ever happened to them. This is the way to go. And this is why the status code never changes, because people who experience deep hurt and trauma sometimes don't understand the root of that trauma, and they now become um the gatekeepers and the enforcers of those same systems that cause them hurt. So I just wanted to say that to frame the discussion. That's where we're starting. So now I am becoming more patient because I understand it's not easy for a lot of people to see what they were told, what they were taught all their lives was not a language, should not be taught, could only be used to curse, etc. It takes a while to get over that. And so the work that we are doing within the Department of Language, Linguistics and Philosophy, within the various linguistics departments across the University of the West Indies, within the Jamaican language unit or the Guyana languages unit, the work that we are doing is one that is very slow, but one that understands that we need to do all of this groundwork with the speakers themselves, or many of them who still see the languages as not adequate. So that's where I'd like to start. And here I should focus on Jamaican because Jamaican is the prime exemplar of this, have improved by leaps and bounds since, say, the 1970s. And a big part of that is migration and music. And I could just say migration because it's the migration of bodies and the migration of music, and the migration of music with bodies or through bodies. Um, so one, lots of Jamaicans started migrating in the 19, in the late 1940s, the 50s, and onwards, and they brought the language with them. And even in situations where they didn't think the language was good enough and they wanted to forget it, there were forces operating against them. And my particular take on it is that as they turned up in their host societies as people who were different and facing racism, they needed something to rally around. And many of them found that those things that they could rally around were language and music. Um, for the first one, they took their cue from other uh minority communities, um, let's say, like the Portuguese in Canada or the Chinese in Canada, um, etc., or the Italians in New York, um, that they were using their languages for in-group purposes. And this was a mark of identity for them. And so all of those Jamaicans who really spoke Jamaican, but ended up in New York or Florida thinking, oh, we speak English. And when they got there, New Yorkers or Floridians couldn't understand them. They thought, oh wow, oh, so we really do speak something that is different, that is not English. And something started to happen. They realized that they now had a language for in-group use in the same way as the Portuguese, as the Chinese. Um, and then there was the music. And it's interesting because Jamaican music, popular music of the 1960s, and I've written on this, um, reggae rock steady, is very English. Um, there's more English than Jamaican in it. But by the middle of the 1970s, and I think um largely because the because of Rasa Fari and because of the Black Power movement, the um the music started now to infuse more Jamaican elements. And that was transported to the diaspora. And children born in the diaspora to Jamaican parents started clinging to this music, and where their parents didn't want to talk to them in Jamaican, they were learning the language on their own by listening to the music. And that still happens today, just that. Whereas in the 1960s and 70s, you had to go out and you had to buy an LP, you had to, you know, you had to get records, and then later on, you had to get cassettes and and you know, record them. Now you could just go on YouTube and you get it's all on our phones, yeah. And so they have greater access to the language. And I think the technology has helped the music to move beyond our borders, and in the same time, because the language moves with the music, it has given the language a platform to. And so, even where Jamaicans themselves don't want to acknowledge the language, people in Africa, people in Europe, people in Asia are saying, wow, this thing sounds good. And they want the music, but they also want the language that goes along with the music. And so we are finding that we are really playing catch-up. We are not where we should be. There are persons who want our music and our language, but because of the attitudes that we have had towards them, we have not really organized in such a way to prepare these things for export. And when I say export, I'm now speaking in explicit business terms, so not just of the thing going out there, but us preparing and packaging it for or them for expert so that we can earn from them.

SPEAKER_04 53:37

Definitely. I think that point brings to mind, you know, you talked a bit earlier about how your unit is and other units, I'm sure, are working to change the minds of people in our islands or you know, in our states. But are you also doing work to sort of standardize these languages for export?

SPEAKER_02 53:56

Well, let's say the work of standardization is not so much about export.

SPEAKER_01 54:02

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 54:02

Communities that standardize their languages generally standardize them for the home population.

SPEAKER_01 54:08

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 54:09

But when you standardize, it makes export easier because there is a homogeneous product that you now have to export. And that has been the chief challenge. As Ugandans and Ghanaians and Nigerians want to learn the language, what is it that we give to them as the language? That has been the challenge. So the work of standardization is a long one, and uh it's one that started decades ago. So for Jamaica, the linguist Frederick Cassidy, who I mentioned, had created a writing system for the language, and that writing system is very simple because it tries to be very regular and uses one symbol always to represent the same sound. And so you don't get this thing as in English where you have S and S can be pronounced in different ways depending where you happen to meet it. So S at the beginning of sing is s, s in the middle of

Music Diaspora And Language Prestige

SPEAKER_02 55:20

pleasure is z, s in um the middle of Caesar is z, s at the beginning of sugar is sh. That's four different sounds um for the one the one letter. The system that Cassidy put together is simple that you even if you are hearing a word for the very first time, you would be able to spell it because the system is regular like that. Um, that's the system that we have been working with as linguists. It was uh updated by the Jamaican Language Unit about um a little over a decade ago, and it's now called the Cassidy JLU system. And many other territories out there, which is what Jamaicans don't know, have taken this system and have modified it for theirs. So in San Andres, they're using a modified version, in Guyana, they're using a modified version, etc. So there again, um, we are a leader in the field, just that we don't know that we are leaders. Yeah. So finding a common and a generally accepted writing system is one issue of standardization. The translation of the New Testament into Jamaican was a very big step in that direction because the New Testament uses the Cassidy JLU system. So you now have this big, this large body of data. Now I'm speaking as a linguist, of literature, let's say, that is in the writing system. And so that's a big step. We have translations of books such as The Little Prince, Alice in Wonderland by um Dr. Tamiron Delissa. She's a lecturer at the University of Guyana. She has translated these stories into Jamaican and they use the Cassidy JLU writing system. So we need more materials in the system. Other challenge, too, is what variety do you use? Which variety will get selected? Jamaican, like any other language, has differences, you know, between urban and rural, between east and west, uh, between male and female, uh, between young people and old people. How are we going to decide? Ah, well, power generally decides these things or helps to decide these things. Um, so what they did for the Jamaican New Testament is that they chose the variety, and this is especially with regard to the markers for past tense and progressive, etc. They chose the variety that is common to Kingston and its environs. So they use did for past tense and they use ah for progressive. And why they do that is simple. A lot of the people who make decisions about the country are in this region. So you don't want to give them something where they're going to say, ah, what that? And they reject it. So they they try to strike a compromise by using did um and uh, but in some areas they you they do use words and phrases that are not so typical of Kingston. And so we're trying to meet everybody, but to create a sort of variety that nobody would feel left out completely. And so these are very deaf sorts of choices that you have to make in the work of standardization. And it's an ongoing process. But again, the more people come on board, is the more that work of standardization because more people start using it for different things and then have questions. Chances are, in the end, we are going to end up with some sort of compromise variety, both in terms of the writing system and also in terms of what markers do you use, etc. But use is the primary um thing that we're going for now. And after we start using it and the issues arise, then we have to find a solution for those.

SPEAKER_04 59:47

So, you know, coming to to bring all together everything that you just said, what are your hopes for Jamaican, for you know, Guyanese, for Trinidadian going forward?

SPEAKER_02 59:58

Um so my hope, of course, is to see these countries finally as not just de facto bilingual, because that is the reality uh on the ground, but also officially bilingual, where the the leaders, the bureaucrats understand that the the Creole languages in these territories are not hindrances, they are actually wonderful resources. Uh, again, coming back to the case of Jamaican, Jamaican English, which is what I'm speaking now, is not really marketable beyond the shores of Jamaica. Anybody out there who wants to learn English, they go and learn British English or American English. What is desirable outside of Jamaica is Jamaican, the Jamaican language. Same thing for persons outside who are of the Caribbean who are interested in SOCO. Uh, what they're interested in is uh Trinidadian, not Trinidadian English. And so we have to understand the value of these intangible resources and so develop them that the populations can benefit. And then it's not it's not only about the direct economic benefit, but it's the immediate social and psychological benefits that eventually become economic benefits. Because think about your being able to train and develop your people in the language that they are most comfortable in. This is not to exclude any other language, because when people feel more secure about themselves, they feel much more comfortable in taking on the world. So somebody who is more linguistically secure is that person who is going to go out and want to learn English, want to learn Russian, want to learn Swahili, want to learn Polish, etc. Because there is this confidence in self that they have. Nothing is going to shake their foundation, as opposed to the current method where you try to destroy that foundation and have people skip to the next step, saying, ignore what you know, ignore what is comfortable to you and learn this. So it's getting us to that point where we can see the benefits of acknowledging what we have and then using what we have as a building block, as a stepping stone to get us to the next step. And then people will now start doing all sorts of creative things with the language, things that they thought could not be done before. And therein lies the other opportunities that will spring out of this. Because now we are treating these languages as if they can only do X. Languages do what their speakers want to do. Yeah. And when we start using them to do, let's say, rocket science, when we start using them to talk about black holes and quantum physics, that creates

Standardising Writing With Cassidy JLU

SPEAKER_02 1:03:35

a body of knowledge or an additional body of knowledge. And then with the creation of that body of knowledge, we get an audience, we get a market, we get consumers, etc. And think about more people on the ground understanding what these things are if they are given to them in their heart language.

SPEAKER_04 1:03:58

Yeah, it builds access to everybody. That's wonderfully said. Thank you so much for that. Well, as a final question, it wouldn't be strictly facts without it. We have a very interesting, what I call the strictly facts sounds segment. Um, so what are some of your you know the favorite creative works that highlight the connection between Caribbean language and our popular culture?

SPEAKER_02 1:04:22

Okay, so I would say uh for me, and I am biased as a linguist, it's those works that address language very directly. Yeah, there are works that that use language in in a kind of new and interesting way. So if you think about let's say the epistolary novel on Jen by Professor Paulette Ramsey of the University of the West Indies, she has this young protagonist writing letters to her mother, and the voice is very much a Jamaican or a Jamaican Creole voice. And so it's almost as if the letters were written in Jamaican Creole. That's pushing the boundary of the language. And so it's when people do new and exciting stuff with the language. For myself, I want to write, I want to write short stories and I want to write novels myself in the language. And when I say in the language, I mean no English. Or if I do English, it's it would be English in the mouth of a character who doesn't speak Jamaican at all. But the narration would be in Jamaican only. And most of the characters would be speaking in Jamaican. Uh, and when I say Jamaican, I mean, you know, um, him look down the road and him say the boy, the mad so forth. And I think we have. A good tradition of that in storytelling. It's just that our storytelling has largely been oral because we are chiefly an oral society. But if I look at those works that mention language explicitly, I would say Louise Bennett's Nolika Twang because it gives you some insight of people's perspective on language, especially in relation to migration and how you could indicate social improvement through adopting another language or adopting another accent. And then there's also by the Mighty Conqueror a song called Trinidad Dictionary. And because one of my areas is lexicography, that one is particularly important for me because it kind of throws out a challenge to lexicographers and says, hey, look, all of these dictionaries out there are incomplete because they don't include or Caribbean words. For Mighty Conqueror, it was Trinidad, Trinidadian words. Thought that was a very nice perspective on things to say, look, your thing, no matter how great you think it is, is not yet finished because you have not yet represented us.

SPEAKER_04 1:07:45

Louise Bennett's poem Nolacle Twang and Mighty Conqueror's song Trinidad Dictionary. Now, Miss Liu is no stranger to Strictly Facts, especially from our third episode, where we discuss her poem Colonization in Reverse. This time we bring to our clash her poem Nolikle Twang, which chastises a boy who returns to Jamaica from a six-month stay in America for not returning with a twang, or in other words, a more foreign accent. Miss Liu here uses her poem to highlight how the Jamaican language has been demeaned and how twanging is often more celebrated and may also lead to a better quality of life. Another, as I mentioned, is the 1960s song Trinidad Dictionary by Calypsonian Leroy Paul, more commonly known as Mighty Conqueror. Mighty Conqueror celebrates the Trinidadian language by naming a number of local phrases and sayings that only a native Trinidadian would understand. He later sings that he hopes there's a time when the government will teach students in this language, emphasizing this longer struggle for national recognition. And he also repeats that he thinks Webster should have come to Trinidad before completing the Webster's dictionary. So our last selection is Tobagonian writer, poet, and lawyer M. Norbesssi Phillips' poem, Discourse on the Logic of Language, from her book, She Tries Her Tongue. In it, she writes about the hostile relationship between English as what she calls the father tongue or a foreign language and the mother tongue, the innate languages of her African ancestors. There were so many pieces on Caribbean language that we couldn't fit them all into the Strictly Fact sound segment. So as always, be sure to check out the Strictly Fact syllabus to get links to these pieces and so many more, including Dr. Farkason's work, more poems, more songs, more creative Caribbean cultural work, and also the Caribbean dictionaries we discussed in this episode. Thank you so much for joining us. Let everyone know where they can find you on social media and all that stuff, as well as you know, the work of the Jamaican Language Unit.

SPEAKER_02 1:10:09

Okay, so first and foremost, for the Jamaican Language Unit, we are on Instagram and YouTube. I think we are on Twitter too. But my team members found Twitter too hostile. And I think because they were using Twitter heavily during uh the petition that we had about two years ago to make the language official. But Instagram we use quite a lot. They post stories, they post proverbs, etc. And also

Creative Works Plus Where To Follow

SPEAKER_02 1:10:40

YouTube, we have a YouTube channel. And in both places, we are broadcast Jamaican, written in the Cassidy JLU writing system. So that is B-R A D K Y A A S Broadcast Jamaican, J A M I E K A N. Broadcast Jamaican. So you can go over to our YouTube channel and subscribe. For me, I'm on Twitter, I'm on IG as J T Farkison. That's J T F A R Q U H A R S O N. So that's Twitter and I G. But please do follow and subscribe to Broadcast Jamaican on our various social media platforms. There, there's there's a lot of interesting stuff there. And from time to time we have discussions on language.

SPEAKER_04 1:11:30

Definitely. We'll have links to everything in our notes for this episode as well as on our Strictly Facts syllabus. So thank you again, Dr. Farkason and Lickle Moore, everyone.

SPEAKER_03 1:11:42

All right. It's me again. I'm back thanking you for listening to this crossover episode with Strictly Facts, a member of the breadfruit media family. And I hope you enjoyed this episode with Dr. Joseph T. Farquarson and Dr. Alexandra Miller. And want to tell you to make sure that you're locked in with Carrion Friends. If you're not already on our newsletter, I will include a link for you to sign up and check in and lock into them. Also check out the Insights paper. And until next time, we're good.